I stole this idea from XL a long time ago. If there were any money involved I supposed I might owe him some, but since there isn't ... thpppppt!

I've had a lot of cars in my lifetime. And since this is my blog and you can't stop me, I'm going to tell you all about every single one of them in annoying detail.

1971 Olds 98

This 20 foot long rolling living room was my very first car. It was dark metallic blue, except for one brown fender resulting from my brother intentionally smashing the car before giving it to me. The back seat was as big as a standard couch and the front was just as good. All it needed was a TV and a bathroom and I could have lived inside comfortably. It also had a 455 cubic inch engine rated at 360 horsepower and 500 ft/lbs of torque, and came with the optional posi traction rear end. It was fun learning to drive with a car that would spin both rear tires non-stop until you decided to let off the pedal, but it was hell on gas.

My brother never forgave me for inheriting the car, which had been Mom's, then his, then after much abuse and drug hauls, it became mine. So after I had had the car for only a year, he convinced My Father that he 'needed' that car, in addition to the car he already had, and that I should have to get something else. Dad loved my brother, unlike the way he felt about me, so he was more than happy to yank it from me and give it back to the son who had ripped the fender off on a tree trunk just because he was so angry that he was having to give the giant land yatch to me and get something new, something which Dad paid for, and something which was much cooler than the tired old Olds.

While all of this was going on, My Father had miraculously begun to notice that for 12 long years I had worked my ass off in school and done very well. He promised to buy me a car for graduation as a reward for working so hard and doing so well. He set a price range for used cars and said I could choose what I wanted as long as it was cheap. I chose a 1971 Camaro and found one for the exact price he had set as my limit. But what he bought instead was a coworker's wife's car, a car that looked like nothing I had ever seen before and which I initially thought looked like a weird, warped Chevelle.

1971 Chevrolet Monte Carlo

It was horseshit green, underpowered by a 2-barrel carburetor, and a complete unknown to me. I had never seen one of these cars before in my entire life, let alone ever wanted one. But it had bucket seats and a console shifter, which was pretty cool. Also, it only had 2 doors instead of 4, a step in the right direction. And it was entirely the correct color, with no primer black replacement panels or a mismatched junkyard fender like the Olds had. All-in-all it was better than I had expected from My Father, considering how little he thought of me.

I drove it for 3 years before wiping out in a rainstorm and tearing up the front end pretty badly while on my way to physics lab at the university. It was going to take me quite awhile to fix it while simultaneously going to school, so I needed something else in the meantime. My Dad had bought a car that he had originaly intended for me to drive when my brother took the Olds, but I hadn't wanted it at all because it looked like raggedy rusted ass. Dad was hooked on it and bought it anyway. But he didn't really need it. When my Monte Carlo was temporarily out of service, he loaned it to me. It was yet another car I had never seen or even heard of before.

1969 Buick Wildcat

It had belonged to a 98 year old woman whose son had to take it away from her because she had rammed it into her own house without realizing it and then backed it down her driveway, up the neighbor's driveway, and run over their fence, all without having the slightest idea that she had done anything wrong. She was a shit driver. And it was a huge tank of a car. And also it had apparently been underwater at some point, as we later discovered.

It had a 430 cubic inch high compression engine, bucket seats, and a console shifter. It only had 67,000 original miles on it. It still had the original 2-ply 70-series tires it had come off the assembly line with. It looked like hell, but it would scream like an angry bitch when you stepped on the gas. Every time I pulled up next to another driver in a Mustang GT or an IROC Camaro, they would look over at the car, which sat about 4 inches off the ground, as you can see in the picture, sneer at the scripted 'Wildcat' on the fender, and then attempt to race me when the light turned green. This was in the early '90s when an IROC Camaro or Mustang GT was the fastest thing on the road and yet still fairly anemic. I quickly learned that the smelly old Wildcat could blow the doors off any IROC without half trying. The Mustang GTs gave it a better challenge, but not much, and never beat it. In fact, I never lost a race in the Wildcat to anything.

It was rusted, ragged, painted by me in my dad's garage using an air compressor and lacquer paint, and smelled like mold inside. I did everything I could for the car, switching it from the used crude oil that my father would pour into it after draining it from his other cars (I shit you not) to Mobil 1 20W-50 fully synthetic oil. The rings were shot and whenever I pushed the pedal down, along with the screaming, knocking, '60s big block roar, there would be a huge cloud of gasoline vapor spewing from the tailpipe, creating a blinding toxic haze behind me. Also, every race used exactly 1 quart of crude oil, which meant that I had to watch the oil level very carefully. Once I switched it to the good stuff the oil burning situation improved dramatically, but rings that are shot are still rings that are shot, no matter what oil you pour into the engine. The windshield leaked whenever it rained, pissing on my leg as I drove. And the ball joints were shot, too, so I went through a set of tires every three months or so.

I learned to mount my own tires using a bead breaker and 2 tire irons and was pretty damn good at it before long. I discovered that Super Shops, located nearby the house, sold a lot of new tires. They didn't have any use for the old tires they pulled off the musclecars they were installing the new tires on, so they just threw them into the dumpster. A friend of mine worked there and would call me whenever they threw out a really good set of low-profile performance tires so I could go get them. The Wildcat started off with a set of shit 2-ply tires, but quickly ended up in Eagle GT 60-series performance radials, which lowered it so much that I frequently bottomed out and scraped the frame on the road whenever I crossed a bridge or train tracks.

The car was a blast, but it was a mess. In the end, it was unsaveable, needing a total frame-off restoration just to deal with the rust and worn out suspension. And ultimately, it wasn't mine to keep. At least, not yet. Eventually Dad wanted it back. Meanwhile, the Monte Carlo was still under reconstruction. So I had to buy another substitute.

1976 Buick Skylark

It was sitting in a sell-it-yourself lot with a sign saying 'needs timing chain'. It was only $200. It was something I would never have bought under normal circumstances, but I was desperate and still in school. And I had already put a timing chain in the Wildcat, so I knew how much of a huge pain in the ass it was, but also that I could do it. So I bought it.

It was a Nova-clone, built on the same half-frame and unibody design as the Chevy Nova. It had a 260 cubic inch V8. It made 140 horsepower. It had air shocks and was jacked up in the back. The tires were skinny and the hubcaps were wire spokes. It was maroon and gay-looking. But once I put on a new timing chain it ran ... well, it ran. The motor had a tick. It just ticked constantly. I don't know why. Nothing was broken. It just ticked.

Once again, I had a car with bucket seats and a console and a funky push-button shifter. There were fishing poles in the back seat. I don't know why the previous owner left them there. I guess he didn't want to fish anymore.

My friend at Super Shops called me around the time I had just gotten the car running to tell me that a pair of superwide low-profile tires had just landed in their dumpster. Once I yanked the tall, skinny tires off the back wheels and replaced them with the big-assed, superwides, the car took on a whole new look. It suddenly had an aggressive stance. It was slower than a drunken turtle, but it looked like a bad-ass motherfucker. The same drivers in the musclecars that wanted to race the Wildcat, only to get their asses handed to them along with 2 big lungfulls of smelly toxic smoke, didn't want anything to do with my Skylark. It was all show and no go, but it was enough as long as no one was willing to challenge it to a race. And most importantly, it got me to class.

I had the car about a year, I guess, when a guy from Seattle turned in front of me in his big-assed Toyota luxury car. And he just stopped there, with his car blocking both lanes heading that direction, and stared at the curb in front of him. I don't know what kind of Toyota it was. It was the biggest Toyota car I had ever seen. And it was cutting me off without leaving me anywhere to go to avoid it. So I hit it. I hit it so hard that I knocked it completely out of the road and up the curb, where it landed, minus both back wheels, perfectly parked in the grass. Unfortunately, the damage it did to my Skylark was pretty extreme. And the insurance company totalled it.

Once again, I needed a temporary ride. My brother called. He had a car I could get for $100 and a bag of weed. I didn't have any weed. So he settled for just the $100.

1973 Mazda RX3 Wagon

I didn't even know there was such a thing as a Mazda RX3. In fact, I didn't know that Mazda had even existed in 1973, but apparently they did. And apparently they made an RX3, available in coupe or stationwagon, too. It had the same rotary engine that all Mazda RX models have. It also had a 4-speed manual transmission, the first car I had ever owned without a V8 engine and with a manual transmission. It had a smashed front fender. I had been doing extensive bodywork on my Monte Carlo, so I was fairly experienced by this time with hammering out dents. Much to my surprise, I was able to push the giant dent out of the Japanese fender using nothing more than the palm of my own hand. The ease with which the fender folded in my hands did nothing to inspire confidence in me, but at least the dent was gone.

The 1973 RX3 had a funny quirk. It seems that it had been the subject of multiple recalls when new. There had been a problem with the rotary engine blowing up when revved too high. It wasn't Mazda's fault. It was the new car owners revving the engines to the moon, which it would easily do. Nevertheless, the exploding motors had hurt Mazda's reputation, so they had recalled the cars twice to 'detune' them. In the end, they ended up with an engine that wouldn't blow up, but backfired through the exhaust every single time it was turned off, blowing the muffler clean off the car. Mazda's solution to this backfiring problem was to recall the car a third time and run a separate pipe along the full length of the exhaust pipe just to allow the engine to backfire without exploding the muffler.

I shit you not.

The car was fun. Except for the night I hit a concrete barrier mysteriously installed on Interstate 565 where it served no purpose and was almost impossible to see after dark. I hit the barrier while merging onto I565 at a speed of about 65 mph. My car launched over the barrier, completely leaving the ground while in mid-turn, and landing on 2 wheels in the middle of the interstate. I had the wheel turned hard to the right in order to stay on the road. I was maintaining the 2-wheel stunt ride as I found myself looking down at the very edge of the asphalt where the road ended and the grass began. If I slipped one inch further to the left I would slide across the grass and into the oncoming interstate traffic. So for what seemed like an eternity I drove along on this tightrope, travelling at 65 mph, and still up on 2 wheels. It was probably only a few seconds, but it felt like 10 minutes. I was finally able to straighten the car out and bring it back down onto all 4 wheels again.

There was a lot of traffic behind me, but no one wanted to pass. Everyone was driving along behind me with a look on their faces like a circus audience wondering "what the hell is he going to do next?"

Aside from this one pants-pissing, heart attack experience, I had no problems driving the car. It was fun and useful and got about a million miles per gallon compared to most of my previous cars. It was the first Japanese car I had ever owned and was more like a go-kart to me than a real car. But it was reliable. It never broke down on me, even after the Speed Racer-like jump I had accidentally subjected it to. And sometimes, when I was in a bad mood or just feeling like a redneck, it was really funny to pull into a parking lot and turn off the car, only to have it backfire and scare the living shit out of every single person in the general area.

Let me make this clear, when this car backfired it sounded like a .38 caliber handgun being fired right next to you. It was loud. Even when you knew it was coming it still made you jump.

I hadn't had the car even a month when my mother came to me, telling me about how my oldest sister had gone through a divorce and needed a car and would I give the car to her for the same $100 I had paid for it? I really needed more money than that, but I knew my sister needed something to drive. So I agreed to the deal.

My sister didn't have the car for any longer than I had when she told my father that the car was a huge embarrassment, which it was. It's not bad enough to be 30 and getting a divorce, having to move with your kids to your parents house to go back to college, only to be stuck driving a funky little car that sounds like it's exploding every time you turn off the ignition. So my father traded her his Cadillac and he took the Mazda.

Dad LOVED the Mazda. He LOVED going to the gas station and pulling in right in the middle of all the other drivers who had stopped for gas, turning off the ignition, and watching everyone leap out of their pants when the bomb went off. He laughed his ass off every time. It was the best toy he had ever received and he made the most of it.

Meanwhile, my brother had another car to sell me.

1973 Toyota Corolla

My brother had pulled it from a ditch for a drunken friend. It turned out to be the same friend who had put the Mazda RX3 into a ditch, causing the crumpled fender that I had repaired using only my bare hand. It was $200 and only needed a few minor tweaks before being safe enough to drive. My brother gleefully informed me that it had Amsoil fully synthetic motor oil in it and therefore "you don't ever need to change the oil!"

It was another 2-door, 4-speed manual with the big 1.6 liter engine, the largest offered that year by Toyota. It was orange-ish. Upon closer inspection it became obvious that it was painted with a brush. And housepaint. It also had a strange brown cable running out the rear passenger vent window and into the trunk. This turned out to be lamp cord which was mysteriously being used to power the taillights. Why it wasn't run under the rear seat and through the trunk was a question I never got to ask, but I always wondered.

The car had 80-series tires on it and looked like it could go off-roading without any trouble. I could bark the tires shifting from 1st to 2nd, 2nd to 3rd, and on rare occasions when shifting from 3rd to 4th gear. I'll be honest, I drove the shit out of this car. I viewed it as nothing more than a toy, like a motorcycle with a roof and doors, and I treated it accordingly. The only motorcycle I had ever owned was a Suzuki dirt bike, and that's how I drove this car. One afternoon, while racing to Dynamics class at the engineering building, I jumped a grass median, sending the car flying through the air and into the middle of an intersection, in order to beat the light before it could turn red. I bounced into the intersection like the Dukes of Hazard in the General Lee, and then intentionally whipped it hard around the turn in a heavy skid, before flying across the campus lawn to the parking lot of the engineering building. And the little car had no problem with that at all. It didn't offer the slightest complaint.

The longer I drove this little Toyota go-kart, and the more I jumped it and slammed the gears, and spun it around in the dirt, all without breaking a single part or being stranded a single time, the more I began to respect the shit out of the car. It was awesome!

And about the time I realized what a cool little toy it was, a guy in a Nissan minitruck hit me head-on in rush hour traffic. It was his fault, but nevertheless the frame was bent and the car was totalled.

I sold the car for $175, still running and still driveable, but in need of about $500 in frame and front end repairs.

Again I needed a car. Again my brother appeared just in the nick of time with a mysterious bargain car he had gotten from a mysterious friend.

1974 Dodge Polara

For $50 and my Gibson SG-1 electric guitar, this Blues Brothers tank was all mine. It was a car that rednecks had banned from smash-up derby competitions along with the stationwagon version of the same car because it was totally indestructible and thus declared 'unfair' for their smash-up contests (I am dead serious.)

While I was in college and driving this car, the city had been doing construction on a section of road near some government housing projects. There were big orange and white striped barrels filled with sandbags lining the road where the construction was going on. Late at night, the ghetto children liked to push those barrels out into the middle of the road, forcing people to stop and move the barrels, only to get attacked and robbed by the oppressed little future-Obama supporters.

I had to work late every Friday night. I usually drove through this area of ghetto fun at 2 a.m., often finding the barrels blocking my way. I was disinclined to stop and move them while oppressed 'protected class' individuals fired guns at me, so I just rammed the barrels down and drove on. Other than leaving some orange paint on my bumper it did no damage to the car at all (thank God I didn't have fucking 'crumple zones' or air bags!) This became a weekly game for me and the ghetto Obamas, but I always won, smashing lots and lots of barrels.

The car had brakes that would quite literally slam your face into the steering wheel if you weren't expecting them. You could stop this 4600 pound monster on a dime. I hadn't had the car for even a full year when my brother got stoned and spray-painted obscenities all over it, which he claimed was "to piss off his neighbors." Once he sobered up I forced him to either repaint the car or give me another one. He happened to have a Chevy belonging to a friend that was parked in his front yard that he said I could take for $50 and my Dodge. I took the deal and he took the Dodge out trail-riding with his friends. They jumped it, hit trees, even shot it. The car didn't die until he jumped it enough times that he broke a ball joint on the front suspension and had to limp home, where he oddly chose to park the damaged vehicle on his front lawn. His friends then took hammers and bats to the body and tried to smash it. All they managed to do was to break the windows. After that he says he towed it to a friend's land where they all got high, shot it, and burned it, before pushing the flaming remains over a cliff. Idiot.

1974 Chevy Caprice Classic

Another $50, my Dodge, and 2 months of damned hard work to figure out what the hell was wrong with the car, and it was my daily cruiser. I drove this thing for years, even taking it to Atlanta in rush hour traffic for a job interview in Norcross, Georgia, just on the outskirts of Atlanta. It rode better than My Mom's Cadillac, but it only had a 2-barrel carburetor and single exhaust, which made it hard for the 400-cubic-inch small block engine to breathe properly. Also, the car had been down in Florida for a number of years, giving it some salty sea air rust here and there. It was pea-green, and not a pretty deep green either, but a faded, pale pea green that was apparently popular with the same '70s people who wore pea-green suits and wide ties. I liked the car, but it had been mislabeled by GM as having a 350 and the resulting chaos of a few 350-specific parts being installed on the little 400 drove me insane. So I sold it to a friend. He pulled the engine, laughed at me for selling him an awesome potential racing motor without realizing it, and then he stuffed it with fabulous new high performance parts before sticking it into his Firebird. He junked the body. It was a waste, really, to trash such a nice car. But what can you do? Time marches on.

1977 Pontiac Trans Am

While I was in college, my father maintained an iron grip on my life, controlling as much as he possibly could for reasons that made sense only to him. I wasn't even allowed to pick my own car without his OK. Meanwhile, my brother, who could do no wrong in his eyes, had taken a car Dad had given him and traded it in for a piece of shit 1977 Trans Am. The car was jacked up in the back, had a giant snorkel-style hood scoop in place of the original shaker, and a cracked 350 engine in it. My brother wasn't very mechanical, so after rigging the cracked engine enough to drive it a bit, he convinced me to buy it from him. Yes, I was a fool to take the deal, but I had been trying to figure out a way to get something like this and without my brother helping me get around my father, there simply was no way.

I cleaned it up, straightened it out, pulled the cracked 350, and installed a highly modified 400 in it. But the more I worked on the car, the more I realized that it wasn't going to work for what I wanted. There was just too much wrong. So I stumbled on another car and made a swap.

1978 Pontiac Trans Am

I bought a 1978 black Trans Am with a solid body and working, non-cracked 350 in it and took it home, lying to my control-freak of a father that I was getting paid by a friend to work on his car for him. I brought the white piece-of-shit Trans Am over, too, and swapped the good 400 out of the white car into the black one, and the 350 from the black car to the white one. I got both cars running fine, and then began doing other work on the black car.

Around this time, my brother asked if he could buy back the white Trans Am. I was glad to sell it to him. He took the car, promising to pay me in installments. But he never did. He pulled the engine, saying he was going to install an Olds 455 he had lying around, but he was lazy and couldn't figure out how to finish the job. Eventually he dumped the now engineless car back on me without paying me a dime. We have not been friends since.

In the meantime, I was hired for a job in Memphis, TN. When I arrived in Memphis, my coworkers, upon hearing that I had a 1978 black Trans Am, advised me that my shiny black musclecar would last about a week before it was stolen and never seen again. I didn't much like this idea, so I sold it back in Alabama, along with a storage unit filled with enough parts to build a 2nd one, all of which would be worth a fortune today.

1981 Datsun/Nissan 200SXA lawyer owned this car. It was his first purchase upon graduating from law school. He rear-ended a pickup truck and mangled the front end a little bit. The insurance company totaled it. He had a special sentimental feeling about the car, so he wanted someone to fix it. He went looking for a poor college student (me) who would be willing to take it for free upon the condition that they fix it and drive it. I was glad to do so.

For years I drove this thing to class, and after graduation, to my jobs, with a silver body and a white front clip I had purchased at a junk yard. After moving to Memphis, I drove it 400 miles with a blown out head gasket before I was able to get it to a mechanic, who expressed utter amazement that the car survived and didn't crack or warp the head.

After the blown head gasket adventure, I drove the car back and forth between Memphis and Rocketown (200 miles each way) for almost 2 years before a black lady in a Ford Escort cut me off in front of the university where I had graduated years before. I couldn't stop and I t-boned her. She reacted by going berzerk, like something you'd see on Maury Povich or Oprah, throwing her hands in the air and moaning and crying. After 30 minutes of screaming and wailing, she admitted that she had just canceled her insurance because it was too expensive (high risk policy) and didn't have any insurance. While the police officer was filling out an accident report, she admitted something about there being an outstanding warrant on her for an unpaid ticket. The officer mumbled something about arresting her, but then forgot. Several months later my insurance told me that despite the extremely minor level of damage, they were totaling the car and taking it away to be crushed. Those cold blooded bastards! It had 174,000 miles on it with plenty of life left. I drove the shit out of that car and it never gave me a problem.

1988 Nissan minitruck

I was so impressed with my Nissan 200SX that when the insurance bastards took it away from me, I went looking for another Nissan. I knew I needed a pickup, for various reasons which included both the shitty roads in Memphis as well as my coming marriage to my then-girlfriend who would then be moving up to Memphis and have lots of crap to haul. My middle sister drove a pickup and advised me to make sure I got one with an extended cab, so I went looking for a used Nissan with the same engine and transmission my car had had, and an extended cab. It wasn't easy to find, but I finally did. I had actually been looking for a white one, having done enough body repair work to know that white doesn't show scratches and dings nearly as much as darker, shinier colors. But my choices were limited and black was all I found available. So black it was.

I bought this truck with 120,000 miles on it. It had few options and wasn't exactly what you'd call luxurious. But I was driving about 100 miles a week back and forth to work, plus an additional 400 miles per week going back and forth between my apartment and my future-wife's apartment in Rocketown, where she was attending college. I needed gas mileage, reliability, and a vehicle capable of surviving the horrifically shitty roads in Memphis, Tennessee. This was perfect.

Today, the truck is sitting in my driveway with 260,000 miles on the odometer. It has hot start issues, a broken waterpump, a radiator damaged by the failure of the waterpump, has been sideswiped by a drunk in Walnut, Mississippi, t-boned by a manager at Autosuck in the AutoSuck corporate headquarters parking garage, rear-ended by a Dodge Neon on the 240 loop in Memphis, rammed a stump hidden in tall grass at Shelby Farms park, sideswiped by a full-sized Chevy van in Redneckville, Tennessee, repeatedly vandalized by a drug-dealing police informant boy I call 'Yo G', and hauled a shitload of mulch for My Wife.

When fixed and running properly, this vehicle serves as our spare car. We figure it has earned the rest from daily driving after all that it has been through.

1970 Chevrolet Chevelle

In high school I had very coldly and logically determined what the perfect musclecar for me would be. I had narrowed it down to a Buick GS455, Pontiac GTO with 455, Olds 442 with 455, or a Chevy Chevelle SS454. But all these cars cost a freakin' fortune, so I had ruled them all out, setting my sights instead on a 1977 or '78 Pontiac Trans Am by virtue of them coming already equipped with everything that I might have to add via aftermarket to a lesser car. At the time, the Trans Ams were far cheaper and easier to find.

My Trans Ams came and went and by now I had a house with my own garage where I could lock away my prized musclecar if I needed to. Living in Memphis, of course, I very much needed to. I had long before sold my Trans Am, so the garage held my old Monte Carlo. But then a friend told me about a guy in my old hometown with a 1970 Chevelle SS454 that he might be selling. I went to take a look.

The guy with the car came outside to find me and my friend looking the car over in his driveway. "What the hell are you doing?" he asked. I had assumed my friend knew him. The car didn't have a "For Sale" sign on it, so how else would my friend have known about the car or that it was for sale? As it turned out, my friend did not know the man, and no one seems to be able to recall how he knew the man was planning to sell it. But he was. "I haven't told anybody that I was going to sell it. That's the damnedest thing. See, I have this friend, he's richer than shit. He's got a dragstrip in his backyard that doubles as his landing strip for his airplanes. He has all kinds of classic musclecars. He wants me to sell this to him so he can cut it up and tub it out and make it purely into a dragster. I'd really rather not see that happen."

We talked, discussed what I wanted the car for, settled on a price, and I bought it. Today it sits in my garage, leaking transmission fluid on my floor since the day I got it. But it'll roast the rear tires any time I want and at almost any speed I'm willing to throw it down and gun it. That's all I want, at this point. I don't do much with it and I should probably sell it. But for now, sitting safely tucked away in my garage, is a car I never thought I'd have.

I won't say exactly what I'm driving currently, except that I like it and it gets me where I want to go. It has 4-wheel-drive and a brush guard, and it's made of steel, not plastic. It has no airbags or crumple zones, like a real man's truck. And it's a lot more comfortable to ride in than my old Nissan. I've already been sideswiped by a woman in an SUV in Cherokee, Alabama, only to discover thanks to her that no one makes the passenger-side mirror for this truck anymore and the generic replacement sucks ass. I've never owned a truck like this before, but I think I have gotten rather used to it.

So, what about you? What cars have you owned in your lifetime?

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What would you do if you had a friend, whom you really liked a lot, who was a supporter of a hate group?

What if it was a hate group that targeted you?

What if it was a hate group that encouraged the murder of anyone like you, and would defend this person if they murdered you, regardless of the circumstances, even going so far as to provide them with a top defense attorney free of charge?

What if your friend was completely deluded about what the movement actually stood for, about what it actually was? What if they insisted it was a nice movement, all about peace and love and everyone getting along and having an equal share of everything, but all the while you knew that it was nothing like that and never had been? You had tried and tried to tell your friend the truth, but they just didn't want to hear it. They didn't want to know the truth because the truth is unpleasant. They preferred the lie because it makes them and everyone like them out to be martyrs and heroes.

"No, it's not like that," they insisted. "Sure, there are some radicals, but that's not what its all about."

"Those radicals created the movement. They run it. They control it and determine everything it does," you countered.

"Yes, but that's not what most people want," they insisted.

"No, I know it isn't. But it doesn't change what the movement is just because you wish it were different. It is what it is."

What if you showed them direct quotes from every single founding member of their beloved movement, as well as all the current leaders, in which these people expressed the most vile and blatant hatred of you and all those like you, and yet your friend stubbornly and illogically dismissed the statements, excusing them by saying things like, "I'm sure they didn't mean it the way it sounds" or "you just don't understand" and still they continued to follow these haters and to defend them and their murderous movement?

What if they would crucify you or anyone else like you if you were to ever make similar statements as those their founders and leaders had made, but you directed the statements back at them?

What if you regularly saw on the news where people just like you were being robbed, denied justice in court, mutilated, tortured, and even murdered by people like them, people who believe what they believe, and then you heard your friend laugh and celebrate these crimes, justifying them and making excuses for the hate criminals, reflexively declaring the victims to be deserving of it despite the fact that your friend knew virtually nothing about the cases or circumstances at all? What then? Would you you blow it off? Would you overlook it?

What if the leaders of their hate movement were experts at making excuses, always twisting everything around so that no matter what evil things their followers did, they always managed to argue that they were the real victims while their victims were declared to be oppressors? What if they were damned good at it, very talented at arguing and persuading lots of ignorant, weak-minded, and youthful people that no matter what, everything they did is always justified, and everything their victims suffered because of them was also always justified?

What if large masses of people joined with them and agreed with them?

What if other nations' governments began to join with them, writing their hate and lies into their laws?

What if the News Media was entirely on their side, promoting all their hatred of you as a kind of religion, declaring that there is no need for debate and it is time that everyone simply accept it all as true?

What if the Media helped them create a huge lie about a conspiracy to oppress them and hurt them, a conspiracy to wage war on them, and when there was absolutely no evidence to support their lie, they simply attempted to manufacture the evidence by claiming they had it hidden somewhere, but weren't going to show it to anyone? What if they were caught in this lie over and over and over again, and yet they were never held accountable, never held to the same standard of truthfulness that you and others like you are held to, so that they could just continue telling lies as often as they wished and it became clear that no one in authority was ever going to do anything about it?

What if the leaders of this hate movement stood before your nation's government and told these lies in order to get laws passed declaring themselves to be a special "protected class" and you and all others like you, to be a "hated unprotected criminal class" with few rights and no legal protections when faced with accusations by them?

What if your government established special federal agencies whose only job was to hunt you and accuse you based on the mountain of lies that by now had been created by them about you, and they paid for these agencies with your hard-earned tax dollars that your government takes from you by force?

What if your friend honestly believed all the lies and truly didn't think they were hurting you with the hate they were supporting, and you got along fine with them otherwise, except when anything related to their religion, their faith in their own superiority came up? Would you remain friends with them?

Would you grit your teeth and just ignore them whenever they spouted off stupid religious dogma and political propaganda related to their faith in the movement that was actively working to enslave and destroy you?

Would you call them a 'hater' and break off all contact with them, even though you knew you were just going to encounter hundreds more exactly like them everywhere you went thanks to the evangelical influence of television over the masses?

Would you take it as long as you could until you finally exploded and punched them in the face?

Would you kill them?

What would you do?

What would you do?

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When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were. When they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning Uphill..barefoot...BOTH ways

Yadda, yadda, yadda!!!

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it!

But now that I'm over the ripe old age of thirty, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today.

You've got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a Utopia!

And I hate to say it but you kids today you don't know how good you've got it !

I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have The Internet. If we wanted to know something, We had to go to the library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalogue!!

There was no email!! We had to actually write somebody a letter, with a pen! Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take like a week to get there!

Stamps were 10 cents!

Child Protective Services didn't care if our parents beat us. As a matter of fact, the parents of all my friends also had permission to kick our butts! No where was safe!

There were no MP3's or Napsters! If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the record store and shoplift it yourself!

Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ'd usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up!

There were no CD players! We had tape decks in our car. We'd play our favorite tape and "eject" it when finished and the tape would come undone. 'cause that's how we rolled , dig?

We didn't have fancy crap like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal, that's it!

And we didn't have fancy Caller ID either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school,your mom, your boss, your Bookie, your drug dealer, a collections agent, you just didn't know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

We didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like 'Space Invaders' and 'Asteroids'. Your guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination!! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen forever!

And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died! Just like LIFE!

You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get up and walk over to the TV to change the channel!

There was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning. Do you hear what I'm saying!?! We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons !!!

And we didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up we had to use the stove ... Imagine that!

That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy . You're spoiled! Youguys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1980 or before!

Happy Easter, all you blogfreaks! Despite Google's decision to completely ignore Easter, even as they acknowledge every single minor, obscure holiday relating to anything and everything else, I'm not going to ignore Easter. It matters. In fact, to some people it matters more than Christmas.

What Easter Is Not About

So Happy Easter from me to you!

sucks

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Question: what happens when a 2800 pound minitruck gets hit by a 4800 pound full-sized truck? Did you ever think about this? Oh wait, you weren't thinking about anything, were you? No, you were just flipping around in traffic like a dodo bird with its head cut off, without any blinkers, without bothering to look and see if there was any room at all for your stupid ass to jam in between two trucks without warning, as those two trucks were stopping at a red light and had no room for you. And then, as if to earn yourself extra asshole points, you even stopped short just to fuck with me even further!

But wait, there's more!

Yes, I came within inches of hitting you. Yes, I would have torn through the bed of your piece of shit minitruck like a Ginsu knife through a beer can. Yes, you would have finally had a reason for that handicapped tag on your rear bumper. Because the effect of being crushed between my truck and the truck in front of you would have snapped your empty swelled head around like a stoned high school girl at an Ozzie Osbourne concert.

Brain salad

You aren't very bright, I can see that. You drive like a drunk, oblivious to everyone else around you. In traffic you're like a Federal Judge, convinced that none of the laws apply to you and all that crap you went through to qualify for your license is a lifetime guarantee that you can trample on everyone else at will with no consequences to yourself whatever.

You're a stupid ass. I could see that you hadn't washed your hair in quite some time. Oh, and you left your fucking door open. Or perhaps you just didn't feel like closing it? I realize that the most mentally challenged among us are all about their feelings, with no respect or consideration for logic, truth, reason or any of that classically masculine sort of thinking. Perhaps you were too busy fumbling with your Hannah Montana CD to notice that you hadn't shut your door before you slammed into gear and took off down the road like Little Red Riding Hood on her way to Grandmother's house?

Your fucking door is open

I do have to ask, though, what possessed you to suddenly repent of your assholeness and play nice? I mean, I appreciate that you suddenly discovered your blinker and even changed lanes to get your slow, reckless, selfish ass out of the left-hand lane. It's just that I didn't see any cops, although they are always hiding right there at the place where you magically discovered traffic laws. Were you sorry for your sins? Did Jesus kick you in the ass? Or were you secretly hoping I'd zoom past you in a huff and get a ticket for speeding?

Say 'cheese'

I guess you noticed that I didn't react to you at all, didn't ride your ass like a high school boy, didn't zoom past you when you got over like any normal angry driver would, didn't flick you off, didn't pass you on the right before you had a chance to get over. I just took your picture.

Yeah, that seemed to get your attention. Funny how that works. So many people just like you, banging around in traffic being total shits to everyone, the minute I pull out my camera and take a few pictures, you suddenly find the 'nice' buried deep in your heart and start playing by the rules like the rest of us.

I love my tiny little keychain camera.

* Addendum: Something is in the air. Everyone in traffic is bitchy. At lunch a woman in an economy car did almost the exact same thing to me as the Asshole of the Week, except that she stopped 10 car lengths from the car in front of her, looking in her rearview mirror the entire time, trying as hard as she could to cause a wreck with me. We hadn't been fighting. There had been nothing going on between us. And had I been riding her ass I most certainly would have hit her. So what was her problem?

I started this series back when no one read my blog at all. It was simply an effort to document for my own benefit the apparent correlation between changes in environment and people's behavior, especially in traffic. We had a cold front move in 3 days ago, dropping our temperature below freezing. Now the cold front is moving out and it is warming back up to normal Spring temperatures. Every time we have a dramatic shift in temperature people react like this. I should have been looking for it. I should have expected it.

KILL KILL KILL!

* Note: yes, I stole that last photo from your blog. There will likely be others.

Shooting Fail

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Yesterday I was buying a 2 large bags of Purina dog chow at Wal-Mart, for my dogs Winston, Chief, Gus, and Maximus. I was about to check out when a woman behind me asked if I had a dog.

What did she think, that I had an elephant?

Since I had little else to do, on impulse, I told her that no, I didn't have a dog, and that I was starting the Purina Diet again, although I probably shouldn't because I ended up in the hospital last time.

On the bright side though, I'd lost 50 pounds before I awakened in an intensive care ward with tubes coming out of every hole in my body and IVs in both arms.

I told her that it was essentially a perfect diet and that the way that it works is to load your pockets with Purina nuggets and simply eat one or two every time you feel hungry and that the food is nutritionally complete so I was going to try it again.

(I have to mention here that practically everyone in the line was enthralled with my story by now.)

Horrified, she asked if I ended up in intensive care because the dog food had poisoned me.

I told her no; I had stopped in the middle of the parking lot to lick my butt and a car hit me.

I thought the guy behind her was going to have a heart attack, he was laughing so hard!

"The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches, but to reveal to him his own."Benjamin Disraeli - British prime minister prior to Dark Era of Destruction by Labour courtesy of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown

"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking"John Kenneth Galbraith - Keynesian Economist, penny-pinching Canadian Scottish liberal

"The American, by nature, is optimistic. He is experimental, an inventor and a builder who builds best when called upon to build greatly."John Kennedy - Irish mafia offspring, sexual experimentor, 'did' Marilyn Monroe, 35th US President

"What one has, one ought to use; and whatever he does, he should do with all his might."Marcus Cicero - Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and strip poker world champion (three times)

"There are two ways of spreading the light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it."Edith Wharton - novelist, disco queen

"Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood."William Penn - statesman who would have hated my long-winded blog

"Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another"John Dewey - educator, philosopher, flower child, submissive fan of leather and whips

"The barrier to success is not something which exists in the real world; it is composed purely and simply of doubts about ability."Franklin Roosevelt - bullshitter, war monger, US President prior to advent of success-blocking affirmative action policy

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